1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to water treatment and/or reclamation systems and methods, including a modular high performance bioswale system and method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Numerous needs exist for treating water, such as to filter constituents such as mineral, chemical, biological, or other particulate contaminants in attempt to achieve clean water to meet various purity goals and/or requirements. Bioswales are created and often used as a standard approach intended to gather and treat water run-off created on or from landscapes, such as storm water, irrigation run-off, or other run-off from other sources. A bioswale is typically located to receive water run-off that is funneled to the bioswale on or from a landscape due to natural landscape grading, or engineered landscape architectural design for this purpose. Typical bioswales comprise a “biologic” reservoir of specific soil and plant life vegetation (e.g. “hyperaccumulators”) which are designed to cleanse water spilled into the reservoir of various constituent contaminants. However, these typical bioswales are not sufficient to provide high performance filtration of many contaminants, and have limited “life” before they must be dug up and replaced with a new bioswale (e.g. every 2-5 years, depending on water fall and contaminant load). More recently, certain engineered solutions have been proposed and some in fact have been put in use for filtering, and reclaiming, water run-off. However, these alleged solutions have several shortcomings.
In the United States, the EPA has certain requirements on municipalities and other public and commercial institutions, and more recently even impacting private property owners and developers, to treat water run-off from their properties—and sufficiently to meet certain test standards of the treated water quality leaving the property. These new regulations are spreading nationally across the states, and mark an urgent need for more efficient and effective water run-off treatment solutions.
There is an increasing need for a high performance bioswale that is engineered to provide optimal filtration performance across a wide range of contaminants, with efficient filtration and reclamation capacity, and permitting efficient and cost-effective installation and removal (as well as maintenance in servicing and “refreshing” the filtration media), and which is also modular and scalable to accommodate a wide range of specific environments of use.